MPI Performance Tradeoffs: Eager RDMA

Eager RDMA: This is an optimization that came out of the realization that RDMA operations on certain networks (e.g., iWARP, IBoE [a.k.a. RoCE], and InfiniBand) are typically faster than send/receive operations. The idea is simple: use RDMA to send short, unexpected messages instead of send/receive semantics. Essentially, this means that a short message will just magically show up in the receiver’s memory without the receiving process doing anything — the RDMA transfer is completely handled in hardware.

The receiver can be aggressively polling on a specific location in memory to find out that a new message has arrived. Polling in this manner can notice the new message much faster than, say, an interrupt, or some other OS-induced mechanism.

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